Telling your kids to ‘suck it up’ could hurt them in the long run

If your kid falls and scrapes his or her knee – what do you do? Do you sit down and hold them while they cry? Or do you give them a pat on the head and tell them to suck it up?

If you lean towards the latter, you might want to listen up. Turns out a tough love approach to parenting could lead to emotional issues later in life.

Recently, a Slate writer (and mom) interviewed a handful of child psychologists to figure out if tough love is a help or a hindrance.

“I’m all for promoting resilience, perseverance, and independence in my kids, and I agree helicopter parenting has to go, but I can’t help think about balance. Isn’t there an ideal middle ground here?” writes Melinda Wenner Moyer.

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To get some answers, Moyer interviewed a handful of child psychologists, who “all agreed that, as much as it’s a bad idea to constantly hover over your kids, it may also be dangerous to act too aloof; parenting is not something that should be polarized.”

The idea that a parent is “either loving and caring, or hands-off and letting kids fend for themselves, doesn’t make sense,” Tovah Klein, director of the Barnard Center for Toddler Development and author of How Toddlers Thrive, tells Slate. Instead, Klein says that parents should strive to do both – “that I’m here for you, but I also trust that you can do this.”

According to ScaryMommy, there’s various studies that back up the “suck it up” approach being detrimental. In one study of preschool-aged children, “researchers determined when parents reacted harshly to their child’s negative emotions, those children tended to have more melt downs and intense emotional reactions to things. They concluded kids whose parents didn’t comfort them when they were upset found it, ‘relatively difficult to behave in a socially competent manner.’”

ScaryMommy also references a 2015 study that found that college-aged men who were “punished as kids by their moms when they got overly upset had more anger management issues than men who’s moms had been supportive when they were younger.”

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So why exactly does telling your kid to “calm down” or “suck it up” lead to bad results? According to Slate, researchers have some ideas. If you scold your child for crying (for say, dropping an ice cream or losing a game), they may feel embarrassed on top of feeling hurt, which could make it even more difficult to come down.

“Children need to practice expressing emotions and learn to deal with them. That leads to resilience. The golden rule is that emotions are never the enemy, even when they are exaggerated,” says North Carolina–based developmental psychologist Ashley Soderlund.

But if you’re constantly comforting your kid, isn’t that bad, too? Not if it’s part of a two-step process, Wenner Moyer writes.

“Once you’ve acknowledged your child’s emotions, you can suggest ways for him to calm himself down and move on.”

What do you think of the “suck it up” approach? Is it a help or a hindrance? Let us know by tweeting @YahooStyleCA.